


first it bleeds, then it scabs

by slybrunette



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag, M/M, Nightmares, but there's a lot of hurt/comfort if that's your thing, there are no sexytimes here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-27 15:50:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21394729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: the nightmares don't just go away.three rounds of basketball without the ball and some dream psychoanalysis with sidney isn’t the cure to all his ills. sure, he’ll take the vote of confidence that he’s not cracking up completely but at the end of the night he’s still left staring at the walls of the swamp with something akin to dread settling in the pit of his stomach, acid crawling up the back of his throat.(or: 5x14, with a twist)
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 17
Kudos: 140





	first it bleeds, then it scabs

The nightmares don’t just go away. 

Three rounds of basketball without the ball and some dream psychoanalysis with Sidney isn’t the cure to all his ills. Sure, he’ll take the vote of confidence that he’s not cracking up completely but at the end of the night he’s still left staring at the walls of the Swamp with something akin to dread settling in the pit of his stomach, acid crawling up the back of his throat. 

“No joy?” BJ asks, in the very harsh light of day, slinging a towel over one shoulder and waiting. It’s not lost on Hawkeye that he’s the one being waited on but, for all that he has to sweet talk himself into bed at night, his body seems to be equally resistant to leaving it come morning. He’s running on fumes. His dark circles have dark circles. 

“Joy? Here?” he asks, because deliberately misunderstanding is more fun than honesty at this stage, at this hour. “You must have taken a turn at the wrong war.” 

BJ smiles. He manages to make it look only a _little_ bit like he knows he’s being bullshitted, which is a remarkable act of tolerance as far as he’s concerned. Hawkeye truly doesn’t know how he does it. “I just meant…”

Hawkeye waves it - _him_ \- off. “I know what you meant.” 

“Right.” 

Sidney is gone on the first transport out. 

“I’d offer you something in the way of more extreme measures but - ”

\- but the choppers won’t stop coming, the parade of broken bodies he’s expected to sew back together again won’t take a hiatus just so he can catch some shut-eye, so for now neither will the nightmares.

It’s the right call. 

Or, at least, it’s the only one they’ve got. 

“I’ll be seeing you, Sid.” 

“Hopefully not too soon,” Sidney says, lightly. 

It takes the edge off the hard truths: if Potter has to call him back again, it won’t just be for a friendly poker game with a side of shrinking. He doesn’t know what comes after that. 

He comes awake to BJ hauling him upright by the arms.

It takes a second or two for his mind to get wise to the fact that the screams reverberating in his ears are his own and then all he can think is _no, not again_.

The light over Frank’s bunk switches on with a startled clamor. 

“Can’t we just sedate him already?”

“Shut up, Frank,” BJ shoots back. 

It sounds like a warning. 

Hawkeye tries to remember how to just breathe instead of panting. 

Potter watches him in OR, as much as he’s able. BJ comes over to offer an assist somewhere in the second round of wounded that comes through, hour seven on his feet and up to his elbows in blood and guts. 

They’re handling him with kid gloves, not half as slick about it as they think they are, and it’s enough to make him want to start screaming in the daylight too were it not for the mask and the shrapnel left to dig out of the belly of a maybe-eighteen year old. 

_Babies. They’re all babies._

“I’m fine,” he rails, later, snapping off his gloves, wrestling himself out of his scrub top like a trapped animal. He’s fine to hold a scalpel but the second he gets out of OR it’s like he’s shaken down to the bones.

BJ remains too calm in the face of it, ever solid. It’s gonna drive him even more crazy than he already feels like he is. “You don’t look it, Hawk.” 

“That’s a fine thing to say to someone who didn’t lose a single patient today,” he grouses, scrubbing at his hands under lukewarm water, for want of something to do, for want of a way to feel clean for once. “Which is more than I can say for some of us.” 

It’s a hit aimed at Frank. Frank who missed a bleeder early on and fumbled his way into a body count while Hawkeye was still on his first patient of the day. But Frank’s still closing up his last. Frank isn’t here and BJ is, and BJ had a kid torn up by anti-personnel mine that he worked on long past knowing it was a lost cause.

So it lands. 

Just not with its intended target. 

“Beej, I didn’t - ” he starts, apology at the ready, but when he turns around he’s alone. 

He’s on his nth refill, glass held loosely between his fingers, by the time he sees BJ again. Frank’s back on shift for the night, so it’s just them and the sun that’s long since dipped below the horizon, and BJ’s spine stiffens before he’s halfway in the door, taking in the tableau in front of him. 

Hawkeye’s pretty sure he’s low on the list of people BJ wants to see right now, after that little display, but BJ comes the rest of the way in anyways, settling uneasily on the edge of his bunk and folding his hands in front of him. His knuckles turn a shade lighter than they should otherwise be, if all was well. Hawkeye decides not to let his eyes linger there. 

“You weren’t in the mess,” BJ says. 

He raises his glass, sardonically. “Figured I’d try drinking ‘til I pass out. And, hey, that way if it comes back up again I can at least say it was pleasant going down, which is more than anyone can say for whatever they’re serving over there.” 

BJ doesn’t even try for a smile. The thin spread of his lips looks more tired than anything. Hawkeye can relate, but he supposes he’s been keeping BJ up at night roughly as much as he’s been keeping himself up. Maybe he should try elsewhere. There’s a cot in the supply tent and while sleeping is not exactly the activity it’s used to seeing it’ll do in a pinch. 

“Actually,” he sets his drink down, gets to his feet with a slight delay, then a more than slight stumble, “maybe what I need is a change of scenery. I’m just gonna - ”

BJ has a hand on him before he even realizes he’s up. Not steadying but stymying. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.” 

“It’ll be fine,” he mumbles, continuing his original train of thought; his mind feels a little muzzier than it did a minute ago, “I’ll hang a sock on the door, no one will question it - ” 

“_Hawk_,” BJ says, mostly to get him to stop talking. Then he lines him up with the edge of his bunk and pushes down. Hawkeye goes, because BJ’s hands on him have always sort of had the effect of rendering him briefly stupid, and the alcohol or the exhaustion has seemingly exacerbated that. He has good hands. Strong, long fingered ones that curl into his shoulders with more gentleness than he probably deserves after today. 

“I’m sorry about earlier,” he blurts, suddenly, the words that died in the scrub room bubbling back up again. “I didn’t mean - that wasn’t about you. You have to know that wasn’t what I meant.” 

BJ does smile now, something softer. One of his hands, the one not tethering him to the bed, sketches a path up and down his arm in what he figures for a reassuring motion. “You need to sleep.”

“Beej - ”

“I know.” 

Hawkeye isn’t sure whether that’s an acknowledgement of his apology or of the argument he’s about to make. He thinks it might be both. 

“Frank’s gone for the night. If it happens again, it’ll just be me you wake up, and I’m a light sleeper anyway.” That, he knows from nights of having to throw pillows at him when the whisper-shouting doesn’t work, is a lie. “Just lie down.” 

He does. He’s not sure it’s entirely voluntary, but he does. “What if I start sleepwalking again? It took me dribbling an imaginary ball for someone to notice the lights were on but no one was home before. Who knows what they’ll let me do in post-op.” 

“Then I’ll tie you to the bed,” BJ says, a lilt to his voice that spells amusement. 

“I might like that,” he replies, his words coming out half-muffled into his pillow. He feels the shift of weight on his cot as BJ’s hands leave him, and he briefly mourns the loss before his eyes slide shut against his will. 

He resurfaces to his heart pounding in his chest.

“It’s ok, I’ve got you,” BJ murmurs, close to his ear, a hand on his back splayed between his shoulder blades. “Shh, you’re ok. It’s just a nightmare. You’re in Korea, you’re here, you’re gonna be - ”

\- and then he slips under once more.

In the morning, he wakes to BJ curled up in the chair next to his bunk. His neck is at an angle that makes Hawkeye cringe and he has half a mind to wake him up and ask if he got lost on the way back from the latrine before he remembers. 

Blood on the snow behind his eyelids and blood rushing in his ears and BJ’s soft reassurances layered over that. He hadn’t come awake screaming again this time. The dreams were still there, but without the all-encompassing terror that comes with startling awake after the crash, the explosion, whatever his subconscious mind had dreamed up as a stand-in for the kind of injuries he sees come by on his table every day. 

He’d woken up, but he hadn’t. He can’t say he feels any less exhausted than he did yesterday - and his head throbs, the edge of a hangover colliding with too-bright daylight - but his hands shake less as he pushes himself to his feet, and he supposes that’s a welcome change. 

But how.

How is such a good question. 

“Beej,” he nudges his shoulder then, stupidly, ruffles his hair a bit. BJ makes a noise that rumbles through his chest and seemingly straight through to the point of contact between them, for all that Hawkeye feels it in the pit of his stomach. “You’re gonna have a headache my hangover is jealous of if you don’t get up.” 

BJ bats at his hands, but he blinks awake after a few seconds. “Did you - ”

“Wake up screaming again? No, that show’s on indeterminate hiatus. Now come on,” he prods at his shoulder again, until BJ is sitting and then stumbling the four feet over to his own bunk. It’s still early yet, he has time for an hour or two more of shut eye if he wants. Hawkeye is pretty content to settle with whatever hours he’s already managed. 

No reason to tempt fate. 

He finds BJ in the mess later, hunched over his still-steaming coffee cup and rubbing at what Hawkeye assumes is the knot in his neck, courtesy of last night’s sleeping arrangements. 

BJ abruptly drops his hand and straightens up when he notices him. It’s no kind of subtle and he pulls a face at him, even as BJ asks, “You doing ok?” 

“Better than you,” he says. “That was a cute stunt you pulled last night. Because what this unit needs is two doctors with their eyelids at half-mast.”

“There’s always Frank.” 

“Half-mast would be an improvement with the way he operates.” 

“I’m fine,” BJ says.

“Hey, that’s my song. Get your own.” 

BJ rolls his eyes. 

Hawkeye takes the opportunity to swipe his coffee out from under him. He’s decided avoiding actual food - or what passes for it here - is the best course of action with the way he feels. An IV of coffee wouldn’t be missed though, even the swill they’re serving today. 

“There a coffee shortage I don’t know about?” 

“Yes,” he deadpans. “Supply sent us motor oil instead.” 

“You’ll hardly be able to tell the difference,” BJ says. He takes his coffee back too, sipping at it with nary a second of hesitation for all the fuss he’d put up about sharing it. “You seem to be in a better mood, at least.” 

“My dreams taking the night off from massacring my childhood friends one by one has that effect,” he says, glibly. “Except I did dream that last night, I just didn’t wake up the whole compound with it for once. Any idea how that happened?” 

BJ pulls just about the worst about face he’s ever seen. “Nope.” 

“Beej, come on.”

“You got a little restless,” he says, like it’s nothing. “I tried to wake you up before you could really get going but you settled down on your own.”

“And then you fell asleep in the chair.” 

“It was fine.” 

“Oh, really? Why don’t you try turning your neck forty-five degrees and say that to my face?” BJ does. It doesn’t look like it’s a comfortable movement. “I’ve passed out in that thing. I know that morning after feeling well. We’re old friends. The kind you avoid at all costs so you don’t have to remember what it’s like to be young and stupid.” 

“Are you done?” 

“With this war? Yes, please, when does my ride home get here?” 

One of the kids BJ worked on two days ago goes into renal failure in the afternoon. 

Hawkeye lingers in post-op, after he checks on his patients - there’s an amputee running a fever that makes him concerned he’s missed something, though Margaret’s of the opinion that it’s slight enough to be standard postoperative fever rather than the infection he fears - and finds BJ dozing, slumped against the wall next to the kid.

“You have something against beds now?” Hawkeye asks, when BJ jolts at the sound of the clipboard knocking against the bed frame, Hawkeye paging through the kid’s chart. The numbers don’t look too promising, but he thinks BJ’s more than aware of that. He’s got that preemptively haunted look that Hawkeye’s seen in the mirror a time or two. “Come on. They’ve got it here.”

BJ rubs at his eyes. “Shouldn’t I be the one clucking over you like a mother hen?” 

“Depends.” He hangs the chart back up. “Would that mean we’d finally get a break from the powdered eggs? Because I could get on board with that.” 

He gets a tired laugh out of that followed by a clap to the shoulder that shakes him more than it would if there were more than sheer stubbornness and cold fear keeping him on his feet. There isn’t an inch of him that doesn’t dread the inevitable moment tonight when the lights go out and the Swamp goes quiet and he’s expected to let himself drift off into whatever hell his mind has awaiting him. 

That he wakes up screaming again goes without saying.

This time it’s Billy Butler on the Fourth of July, a handful of sparklers and the smell of burnt flesh every time he inhales. It takes too long for him to realize the broken keening noise he hears is coming out of his own mouth, and by then BJ is on kneeling on his cot, wrestling him into stillness.

“I need to - ”

“No, no,” BJ catches his wrists, knees all but bracketing his legs in his attempts to keep him down. In any other situation, he’d have a joke at the ready, but all he can think about is how he has to get out of his bunk, he has to get Radar to patch a call through back home, he has to - “everyone’s fine, Hawk. We’ve been through this. You make any more long distance calls to Crabapple Cove and the Army’s gonna start docking your pay.” 

If only he was capable of laughter rather than choked sobs. “But it was so real, I can still - ” taste the gunpowder, the air thick with it from the explosions overhead, smoke and smog invading his lungs the way it did at the aid station; he wheezes with it now, with the memory of it, and BJ starts up that soft back-and-forth motion again along the knobs of his spine. “Oh god. I really am cracking up, aren’t I?”

“No. It’s just a rough patch,” BJ insists, with more conviction than Hawkeye has left in his entire body. He doesn’t know where he gets it from. He’s fairly certain he isn’t deserving of any of that faith. “You’ll get through it. You’ll be ok.” 

“What if I don’t, though? What if - ” his hand drops uselessly to the bed in an aborted gesture, his thumb brushing BJ’s thigh on the way down. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep losing people all day in OR and then losing them in my dreams too.” 

“I know,” BJ says, barely above a whisper now; Hawkeye feels his exhale as a puff of air against his cheek, and he closes his eyes to block out the fact that all he needs to do is lean an inch or two closer and their foreheads will be touching. He doesn’t have the mental clarity to unpack that right now. Or possibly ever. “We’ll figure out something.” 

_We_.

He smothers the laugh that bubbles up in his chest. 

“He belongs in the looney bin is where he belongs,” Frank erupts, during breakfast, his voice carrying clear across the mess. Hawkeye lets his fork clatter to his tray, what was left of his appetite suddenly departing him. 

“It’s a good thing you’re not a doctor, Frank, because your bedside manner could use some work,” BJ says, smoothly, but there’s heat to it, and Frank makes that pinched face like he’s about to escalate things for the sake of his bruised ego. 

Hawkeye would rather not be around for that.

So he makes sure he isn’t.

BJ’s patient stabilizes and his worsens. 

The fever turns out to be a secondary infection unrelated to the surgery and they pump him full of penicillin but there’s not a whole lot else they can do other than cross their fingers and pray. Even Margaret makes a point of telling him it’s not his fault, but if he loses a patient while he’s running himself ragged he’s not sure if his career is going to survive it much less his sanity. 

Potter dragging him into his office isn’t unexpected. 

“Ordinarily, I’d let you get some R&R in Seoul for a few days, but they’re in peace talks again and you know what that means for our boys at the front.” More bodies to sew back together. More hours spent in OR fixing the unfixable. “We can’t afford to be down a surgeon right now. But we’ll manage if we have to.” 

His head snaps up. “Colonel - ”

“Son, I’m asking because I trust your judgment. Do you need me to call Dr. Freedman?”

_Hopefully not too soon._

Hawkeye swallows. 

“No. No, I’m - ” lost, losing, afraid to close his eyes for fear of what he’ll see, afraid to get out of bed for fear of how he’ll slip up, _afraid_. “I can handle this. I _am_ handling this.”

“See that you do,” Potter says, but it’s not half as gruff as it could be. “And Pierce? We all have limits. If you think you’ve hit yours, it’s better to address it sooner than later.” 

He’s still awake when BJ gets off shift past midnight. 

At least, mostly. He’s reread the same paragraph eight times by the time BJ croons _hi, honey, I’m home_ from the doorway, slipping off his coat. Hawkeye thumbs down the corner of the page he’s on and tosses the book aside, blinking away sleep. 

“Looks like Ellis is going to pull through,” BJ says, puffed up a little. Proud. And he should be. He’s a good doctor. Hawkeye doesn’t tell him that often enough. 

“That’s really good, Beej.” 

“What about your guy?” 

Hawkeye looks away abruptly. He figures that’s answer enough. His patient is no better and no worse, stuck somewhere in limbo like a painfully apt mirror into his own state of being and all of it feels like his fault no matter what anyone tells him. No matter how irrational it is. What was it that Henry used to say? _Rule number one is young men die. And rule number two is doctors can’t change rule number one._ He’s lost - and almost lost - patients before. He’s done it daily. He just hasn’t been in the process of losing his mind at the same time. 

“_Hawk_.” 

BJ says it like he’s been saying it for a while. Maybe he has. Hawkeye blinks, tries to shake off the fog that keeps threatening to overtake his brain. “Sorry,” he says, and he is. He knows how difficult he’s been these last few - god, it’s not just days anymore, they’re rapidly coming up on weeks since he’s had a normal night of sleep that didn’t end in some horrific fashion. “You know, I closed my eyes in the scrub room today and when I opened them again I was in the showers. Just standing under the water. No idea how long I’d been there. No idea if I did anything in between.”

“You think you’re sleepwalking again?”

Hawkeye shrugs. 

How would he know?

“Ok, that’s it,” BJ says, like he’s come to a decision. Hawkeye feels his pulse speed up, the way it does when he’s ripped from a nightmare, that initial spike of fear. This is where BJ hauls him off to Potter’s office and Sidney Freedman gets an unexpected middle-of-the-night phone call. It could be his ticket home but it makes Hawkeye want to bolt rather than celebrate, and he scrambles to his feet, a little more uncoordinated than usual, ready to turn this into an argument in the hopes that BJ will decide it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Of all the people in this place he’d have thought he could trust -

But BJ just frowns at him, stripping off his shirt and exchanging it for a clean one that hasn’t seen the inside of an OR recently. He tosses the old one on his bunk in a ball and snags the thin blanket that’s bunched up at the foot of it, starting back towards him. 

“Time for beddy-bye,” BJ says, without a hint of irony, and then maneuvers him back down onto the bed. It’s a repeat of the other night, except this time BJ also instructs him to scoot over and climbs in after him. 

If his pulse needed to slow down before, then this might stop it altogether. 

His bunk is small and there’s no way to so much as breathe without touching him so Hawkeye opts not to. Just until BJ’s temporary lapse in judgement abates. Any second now he’ll remember Peg waiting for him back in the States and all the ways Frank’s tendency towards the dramatics could bite them in the ass should he walk in and find them sharing a bed, and then he’ll be gone. Hawkeye wouldn’t even blame him. 

Seconds pass. 

BJ winds an arm around his back and Hawkeye shivers hard enough that his teeth chatter. It’s all he can do not to curl into him like a cat. “Just relax.” 

Relax. _Hilarious_. As if that’s gotten him anywhere lately. “You realize I’m likely to deafen you when I wake up screaming again?”

“You won’t.” 

“I’m serious, Beej.” 

He tries to push up onto his elbow but BJ holds fast. On a good day, Hawkeye can overpower him or at least outmaneuver him. This is not a good day. Hawkeye crumples back down and is rewarded by that slow, even stroking motion against his skin that’s going to drive him to an early grave. “Sidney thinks the problem is the war keeps following you home, right?” 

“Something like that.”

“Maybe he’s right,” BJ says. “Maybe going home is the problem.” 

“And here I thought _I_ was the one cracking up. Turns out it’s been you this whole time. It really is always the quiet ones.” He can’t see BJ’s eyes - it’s too dark and they’re too close and, even if he could, he's not sure he’s brave enough to look directly at him right now - but he can hear the tired sigh, so he can imagine he’s getting the most unimpressed look of his life. And he’s had some doozies before. “Alright, lay it on me, Dr. Hunnicutt. Is it PhD or M.D.? I’ve never been sure with you guys. Oh, and then there’s that other one, what’s it, begins with a ‘p’ - ” 

“You calmed down when I reminded you where you were.”

“What?” 

“The other night. You asked how you didn’t end up - ”

“Doing my best Fay Wray impression?”

BJ hums an affirmative. “You didn’t settle yourself down. You thrashed around ‘til I made you stop and then you went deadweight on me when I told you we were in Korea. Didn’t make so much as a peep the rest of the night. Could be a coincidence, but…maybe it’s more than just not being able to forget the things we see here when you’re dreaming. Maybe you’re worried that it’ll follow you home even after you leave this place.”

“You think I’m scared to go home?” 

“I think you’re scared things won’t ever be the same once you do.” BJ pauses, for a moment, then quietly adds, “I know I am. Sometimes.” 

He wriggles out from under BJ’s arm and off his bunk like a caged animal yearning to be free, a mess of limbs and blind flailing. It feels like it’s either that or hyperventilating. “So what - I’m just supposed to spend the rest of my time here scared shitless to sleep and hope it’ll all stop when this godforsaken war ends? Cause I gotta tell you there’s a few thousand wounded who are probably going to object to me operating on them with my eyes closed.” He paces a little, listening to the blankets rustling as BJ sits up in bed. “That kid I’ve got that’s running the hundred and one degree fever probably wants his money back. Or his life back.” 

“He’ll pull through.” 

“You don’t know that.” 

“We all lose patients here, Hawk. All of us. Even you.” 

He shakes his head. “No, this is different. This is on me. I shouldn’t be anywhere near a scalpel right now.” 

“Neither should Frank.” For once, the joke isn’t funny. It hangs in the silence between them before BJ reaches out and snags him by the arm. He doesn’t pull him closer, just holds him there. “You need to sleep. You’re gonna wear a hole in our nice new dirt floors if you keep that up.” 

“I never used to dream about going home. All this time I’ve been here and I never - and now it’s all I can dream about.” He feels the fight leave him, sagging a little on his feet, exhausting hitting all over again. BJ gives his arm a tug, nodding to the space next to him, and Hawkeye drops down into it on autopilot. “How do you stop something you didn’t start?” 

“It might stop all on its own.” 

“How? And when?” 

“I don’t know.” It’s not what he wants to hear, but at least it’s honest. “You’re not cracking up. You’re not crazy. At least not any more than the rest of us. You’re just going through something and maybe you need a little help dealing with it.” 

“Any suggestions?” 

BJ uses that grip he still has on his bicep to nudge him horizontal and Hawkeye goes, their positions flipped this time so that his back is to BJ’s chest. The upside of that is no more avoiding eye contact. The downside is that it’s so very close to spooning that Hawkeye’s pretty sure he’ll never be able to look Peg Hunnicutt in the eye either. 

He’s so screwed. 

“I swear I’m not usually this easy.” 

BJ laughs, softly, and Hawkeye feels the way it rumbles through him all along his spine. “There’s a camp full of nurses that would argue otherwise.” 

“It’s a conspiracy.” 

“Mmhm.”

“They’re attacking my virtue.” 

“Go to sleep, Hawk.” 

He tries to argue with that, he does, but all that comes out is a yawn. BJ tucks him in closer, one arm wrapped around his waist, under the covers for the sake of plausible deniability. It’s risky. But then so is sleep, and right now he feels like he could. “Beej?”

BJ seems to understand the question without him having to verbalize it. This feels increasingly like a Hail Mary pass, the last ditch effort standing between him and a private room in Seoul with Sidney as his only visitor. He doesn’t want to go down that road. “Trust me.” 

And he does.

So he sleeps. 

Hawkeye dreams of the aid station, of mortar shells raining down above his head, of blood pooling until his boots are sticky with it, fingers stained red. There’s more dead than dying and it’s just him out there, him and his bag of tricks, no sanitized scrub room, no cracking jokes over operating tables to try to bury the horror of what’s in front of them. 

If ever there was a time for screaming. 

And yet. 

He wakes once, not in terror but to a whisper of movement at his back. BJ returning from the latrine, judging by the darkness that greets him when he blinks his eyes open, the shifting of blankets as BJ settles in next to him. He drops off again to the sound of even breathing, leeching the anxiety out of him at the thought of going back to that dream, to that place, and doesn’t stir again until there’s light just beyond his eyelids. 

BJ’s lacing up his boots, bent in half on his own cot. Hawkeye knows it without looking from the sound it makes, and when he rolls over into the newly empty space beside him he finds the faint warmth left behind oddly settling. 

Frank’s whingeing is not. 

“You don’t want me as an enemy, Frank.”

“I thought we were already enemies.” 

“Wake him up for anything less than choppers and I’ll be happy to show you the difference,” BJ warns. Hawkeye can hear the accompanying smile just as much as the edge underneath it, and he smiles into his pillow but stays otherwise quiet, content to let himself drift once more. 

“You’re gloating.” 

There had been no choppers. Hawkeye had meandered out of the Swamp mid-morning, at the mercy of his own bladder, and was surprised to find the daylight a little less headache inducing than the day before. 

Not waking up in a pool of his own sweat with his lungs burning was also a bonus. 

“I’m not gloating,” BJ insists, dissecting the mystery meat of the day with more curiosity than hunger, far as he can tell. “I simply asked if you slept alright.” 

“You know exactly how I slept,” Hawkeye says, under his breath, which only serves to make it sound ten times more scandalous than it actually is. BJ smiles around a forkful of something that used to be green ten years ago. “My dreams weren’t exactly a picnic though.” 

“So what’s different?” 

He sighs. “I was in Korea.” 

“Imagine that.” 

“You’re insufferable,” Hawkeye says, but what he means is _thank you_. 

fin.


End file.
